Tag Archives: Salesforce

Ayan Sarkar, Global Head of Insurance for Salesforce, talks with Paul Winston, COO of ITL, about the launch of a series of insurance-focused solutions and services both within Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud and in its Einstein Data and Analytics solution. The solutions, he says, are designed to help insurers and agents enhance the way they digitally engage with customers and deliver more personalized experiences, all from the ease of a cloud based solution.

We are finally beginning to experience a long-awaited revolution in the insurance industry. Historically, insurance has been one of the last and slowest industries to embrace technology as a means of modernization and process innovation. The insurance industry is fragmented, without common standards, and until very recently did not attract many investment dollars, which exacerbated the general lack of incentive to modernize. However, in the past few years, we have seen signs of revitalization in the industry, and it is becoming an exciting time to be a part of the insurance community.

According to a report published by the National Institutes of Health, “Healthcare costs in the U.S. now account for 16% of the country’s gross domestic product, and per capita healthcare spending is approximately twice that of other major industrialized countries. Inefficiencies persist within the healthcare system because—in contrast to other economic sectors in which competition and other economic incentives act to reduce the level of waste—none of the healthcare system’s players have strong incentives to economize.”

It has been said that 40 manual workflows make up 25% of an insurer’s cost of doing business. A recent report by Newsweek–sponsored by Salesforce and Deloitte, which included a survey of 300 C-level insurance IT executives–found that in the quote-to-enroll process, only 4.5% of new business is “mostly” or “extensively” low-touch. About 52% of the processes used are achieved manually. When taking time to dive deep into their process, John Hancock discovered that even for one line of coverage, 120 steps could be condensed to seven and turnaround time reduced from several days to a few minutes.

Those of us who have been in the industry for some time are all too familiar with the time-consuming processes that have been used for decades, and there are a variety of players who have decided to do something about it. The past few years have seen an unprecedented amount of investment money flowing into the insurtech industry, which is beginning to change the market outlook as well as boost competition, which in turn is motivating startups and established companies alike to embrace change. We are beginning to see new partnerships and the building of the infrastructure necessary to overhaul the industry, enabling a new focus on user experience and connecting APIs instead of the endless custom work typically required in this industry.

There’s a new optimism in the insurance industry that is catching fire. According to a recent report by Accenture, “In five years, nearly all the insurance executives in our survey expect the industry to be transformed by digital technologies.” Further, the report found that 90% of insurance executives state they have a coherent, long-term plan for technology innovation in place. Quicker turnaround times, automated processes and good user experience translate to more new business, higher retention and lower employee frustration and, arguably, could help bring down the costs of healthcare overall.

There are at least three areas that need to be addressed to help the insurance industry to modernize and innovate. Insurance professionals would agree that the most common problems in the old processes are the incessant need to copy and paste, the aggravating issue of double entry and the frustration of having to cross-reference multiple sources to get accurate information. We need to break down silos, open up data and replace legacy systems to get these processes running more smoothly and quickly.

Breaking down silos

In Accenture’s report, “47% of survey respondents also say lack of collaboration with the IT function is preventing them from realizing their technology investments’ value.” From our own experience and years working in the benefits industry, I cannot tell you how many hours, days and months have been lost simply copying and pasting information from one Excel file into another, having to log into multiple systems to manually log information or to simply verify that the information needed to accomplish the task at hand is indeed accurate. Unlike other industries, there are very few APIs available that allow systems to communicate and connect with each other. Because of this lack of connectivity, many employees at insurance companies end up using up to five to 10 systems simply to complete their everyday tasks.

Automating

Once there begins to be a focus on modernizing and upgrading core systems, a carrier can begin to think about real efficiencies, including automation. Automating even a few of the top 40 manual processes would increase productivity and performance. Imagine the ability to:

Automate the confirmation of group information for a master data store to automatically verify its accuracy

Auto-ingest census information by machine reading

Consolidate account information into a single record

Provide one point of entry to populate multiple systems

Automating these processes not only leads to quicker turnaround times and better efficiency, but it also enables insurance professionals to close more new business and gives them a competitive edge and a way to stand out from those companies that may be slower to adapt to new technologies.

Working with possible competitors, as well as vendors, is becoming increasingly important, and new levels of collaboration are necessary for companies that wish to thrive in the digital economy. There is no one system that does everything that an insurer needs; it simply does not exist at this point and may not exist for several years. McKinsey says that “ecosystems will account for 30% of global revenues by 2025” and that, “to succeed in ecosystems, insurers will have to take a hard look at their traditional roles and business models and to evaluate opportunities to partner with players in other industries.”

We are still facing an uphill climb to transform the insurance industry from stodgy to streamlined, but there are signs of a renewed energy and drive that show promise. As more and more insurance companies and partners see the value of digitization, automation and collaboration, everyone will benefit from a more connected ecosystem, and the insurance industry will do its part to make healthcare a more manageable, and possibly even satisfying, experience for the consumer.

“Somehow we have created a monster, and it’s time to turn it on its head for our customers and think about providing some certainty of protection.” – Inga Beale, CEO, Lloyds of London

In an early-morning plenary session at this year’s InsureTech Connect in Las Vegas, Rick Chavez, partner and head of digital strategy acceleration at Oliver Wyman, described the disruption landscape in insurance succinctly: while the first phase of disruption was about digitization, the next phase will be about people. In his words, “digitization has shifted the balance of power to people,” forcing the insurance industry to radically reorient itself away from solving its own problems toward solving the problems of its customer. It’s about time.

For the 6,000-plus attendees at InsureTech Connect 2018, disruption in insurance has long been described in terms of technology. Chavez rightly urged the audience to expand its definition of disruption and instead conceive of disruption not just as a shift in technology but as a “collision of megatrends”–technological, behavioral and societal–that is reordering the world in which we live, work and operate as businesses. In this new world order, businesses and whole industries are being refashioned in ways that look entirely unfamiliar, insurance included.

This kind of disruption requires that insurance undergo far more than modernization, but a true metamorphosis, not simply shedding its skin of bureaucracy, paper applications and legacy systems but being reborn as an entirely new animal, focused on customers and digitally enabled by continuing technological transformation.

In the new age of disruption …

1. Insurance is data

“Soon each one of us will be generating millions of data sets every day – insurance can be the biggest beneficiary of that” – Vishal Gondal, GOQUii

While Amazon disrupted the way we shop, and Netflix disrupted the way we watch movies, at the end of the day (as Andy G. Simpson pointed out in his Insurance Journal recap of the conference) movies are still movies, and the dish soap, vinyl records and dog food we buy maintain their inherent properties, whether we buy them on Amazon or elsewhere. Insurance, not simply as an industry but as a product, on the other hand is being fundamentally altered by big data.

At its core, “insurance is about using statistics to price risk, which is why data, properly collected and used, can transform the core of the product,” said Daniel Schreiber, CEO of Lemonade, during his plenary session on day 2 of the conference. As copious amounts of data about each and every one of us become ever more available, insurance at the product level– at the dish soap/dog food level–is changing.

While the auto insurance industry has been ahead of the curve in its use of IoT-generated data to underwrite auto policies, some of the most exciting change happening today is in life insurance, as life products are being reconceived by a boon of health data generated by FitBits, genetic testing data, epigenetics, health gamification and other fitness apps. In a panel discussion titled “On the Bleeding Edge: At the Intersection of Life & Health,” JJ Carroll of Swiss RE discussed the imperative of figuring out how to integrate new data sources into underwriting and how doing so will lead to a paradigm shift in how life insurance is bought and sold. “Right now, we underwrite at a single point in time and treat everyone equally going forward,” she explained. With new data sources influencing underwriting, life insurance has the potential to become a dynamic product that uses health and behavior data to adjust premiums over time, personalize products and service offerings and expand coverage to traditionally riskier populations.

Vishal Gandal of GOQuii, a “personalized wellness engine” that is partnering with Max Bupa Insurance and Swiss Re to offer health coaching and health-management tools to customers, believes that integrating data like that generated by GOQuii will “open up new risk pools and provide products to people who couldn’t be covered before.” While some express concern that access to more data, especially epigenetic and genetic data, may exclude people from coverage, Carroll remains confident that it is not insurers who will benefit the most from data sharing, but customers themselves.

Some of the most standout sessions of this year’s InsureTech Connect were not from insurance companies at all, but from businesses either partnering with insurance companies or using insurance-related data to educate their customers about or sell insurance to their customers as a means of delivering more value.

Before unveiling a new car insurance portal that allows customers to monitor their car-related records and access a quote with little to no data entry, Credit Karma CEO Ken Lin began his talk with a conversation around how Credit Karma is “more than just free credit scores,” elucidating all of the additional services they have layered on top of their core product to deliver more value to their customers. Beyond simply announcing a product launch, Lin’s talk was gospel to insurance carriers, demonstrating how a company with a fairly basic core offering (free credit scores) can build a service layer on top to deepen engagement with customers. It’s a concept that touches on what was surely one of the most profound themes of the conference–that, like free credit scores, insurance only need be a small piece of a company’s larger offering. This may mean embedding insurance into the purchase of other products or services (i.e., how travel insurance is often sold) or it may mean doing what Credit Karma has done and layering on a service offering to deepen engagement with customers and make products stickier.

Assaf Wand, CEO of the home insurance company Hippo, spoke to both of these models in his discussion with David Weschler of Comcast about how their two companies are partnering to make insurance smarter and smart homes safer. When asked about what the future of insurance looks like, Wand put it plainly when he said: “Home insurance won’t be sold as insurance. It will be an embedded feature of the smart home.” Jillian Slyfield, who heads the digital economy practice at Aon, a company that is already partnering with companies like Uber and Clutch to insure the next generation of drivers, agrees: “We are embedding insurance into these products today.”

Until this vision is fully realized, companies like Hippo are doing their part to make their insurance products fade into the background as the companies offer additional services for homeowners, “Can I bring you value that you really care about?” Wand asked, “Wintering your home, raking leaves, these are the kinds of things that matter to homeowners.”

To many outside the insurance industry, the idea of good customer experience may seem unremarkable, but for an industry that has for so long been enamored by the ever-increasing complexity of its own products, redefining processes around customers is like learning a foreign language as a middle-aged adult. It’s hard, and it takes a long time, and a lot of people aren’t up to the task.

The insurance industry has been talking about the need for customer-centricity for a while now, but many companies continue to drag their feet. But customer-centricity is and remains more than a differentiator. It’s now table stakes. How this plays out for the industry will look different for different companies. Some will turn to partnerships with insurtechs and other startups to embed their products into what are already customer-centric experiences and companies. Chavez of Oliver Wyman would rather see the industry “disrupt itself,” as he believes it’s critical that companies maintain the customer relationship. In his plenary sessions, he cited the German energy company Enercity as a company that disrupted itself. Operating in a similarly regulated industry, rather than becoming just a supplier of energy, the company invested heavily in its own digital strategy to become a thought leader in the energy space, to be a trusted adviser to its customer and to deliver an exceptional digital experience that, among other things, leverages blockchain technology to accept bitcoin payments from customers. For Chavez, insurtech is already a bubble, and, “If you want to succeed and thrive in a bubble, make yourself indispensable.” The only way to do this, he believes, is to maintain ownership over the customer experience, because, in today’s digital economy, the customer experience is the product.

But to own the customer experience and succeed will require insurance companies to completely reorient their business practices and processes – to start with the customer and the experience and work backward toward capabilities. In the words of Han Wang of Paladin Cyber, who spoke on a panel about moving from selling products to selling services, “It’s always a questions of what does the customer want? How do they define the problem? And what is the solution?”

4. Insurance is trust

“The world runs on trust. When we live in a society where we have lots of trust, everyone benefits. When this trust goes away, everyone loses.” – Dan Ariely, Lemonade

During a faceoff between incumbents and insurtechs during one conference session, Dylan Bourguignon, CEO of so-sure cinched the debate with a single comment, calling out large insurance carriers: “You want to engage with customers, yet you don’t have their trust. And it’s not like you haven’t had time to earn it.” This, Bourguignon believes, is ultimately why insurtechs will beat the incumbents.

Indeed, the insurtech Lemonade spent a fair amount of stage time preaching the gospel of trust. Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and chief behavior officer at Lemonade, delivered a plenary session entirely devoted to the topic of trust. He spoke about trust from a behavioral standpoint, explaining how trust creates equilibrium in society and how, when trust is violated, the equilibrium is thrown off. Case in point: insurance.

Insurance, he explained, has violated consumer trust and has thrown off the equilibrium–the industry doesn’t trust consumers, and consumers don’t trust the industry, a vulnerability that has left the insurance industry open to the kind of disruption a company like Lemonade poses. As an industry, insurance has incentives not to do the thing it has promised to do, which is to pay out your claims. And while trust is scarcely more important in any industry as it is in insurance, save in an industry like healthcare, the insurance industry is notoriously plagued by two-way distrust.

What makes Lemonade stand out is that it has devised a system that removes the conflict of interest germane to most insurance companies – as a company, it has no incentives to not pay out customer claims. In theory, profits are entirely derived by taking a percentage of the premium; anything left over that does not go to pay out a claim is then donated to charity. The result: If customers are cheating, they aren’t cheating a company, they are cheating a charity. Ariely described several instances where customer even tried to return their claims payments after finding misplaced items they thought had been stolen. “How often does this happen in your companies?” he asked the audience. Silence.

And it’s not just new business models that will remedy the trust issues plaguing insurance. It’s new technology, too. In a panel titled “Blockchain: Building Trust in Insurance,” executives from IBM, Salesforce, Marsh and AAIS discussed how blockchain technology has the capacity to deepen trust across the industry, among customers, carriers, solutions providers and underwriters by providing what Jeff To of Salesforce calls an “immutable source of truth that is trusted among all parties.” Being able to easily access and trust data will have a trickle down effect that will affect everyone, including customers, employees and the larger business as a whole–reducing inefficiencies, increasing application and quote-to-bind speed, eliminating all the hours and money that go into data reconciliation and ultimately making it easier for carriers to deliver a quality customer experience to their customers.

While the progress in blockchain has been incremental, the conference panel demoed some promising use cases in which blockchain is already delivering results for customers, one example being acquiring proof of insurance for small businesses or contractors through Marsh’s platform. With blockchain, a process that used to span several days has been reduced to less than a minute. Experiences like these–simple, seamless and instantaneous – are laying the groundwork for carriers to begin the long road to earning back customer trust. Blockchain will likely play an integral role this process.

5. Insurance is a social good

“We need insurance. It is one of the most important products for financial security.” – Dan Ariely, Lemonade

For all of the the naysaying regarding state of the industry that took place at InsureTech Connect, there were plenty of opportunities for the industry to remind itself that it’s not all bad, and its core insurance is something that is incredibly important to the stability of people across the globe. Lemonade’s Schreiber called it a social good, while Ariely told his audience, “We need insurance. It is one of the most important products for financial security.” Similar sentiments were expressed across stages throughout the conference.

In fact, in today’s society, income disparity is at one of the highest points in recent history, stagnating wages are plaguing and diminishing the middle class, more people in the U.S. are living in poverty now than at any point since the Great Depression, the social safety net is shrinking by the minute and more than 40% of Americans don’t have enough money in savings to cover a $400 emergency, so insurance is more important than ever.

For Inga Beale, CEO of Lloyds of London, insurance has a critical role to play in society, “It goes beyond insurance–it’s about giving people money and financial independence,” she said during a fireside chat. She went on to describe findings from recent research conducted by Lloyds, which determined that, by the end of their lives, men in the U.K. are six times better off financially than women. When designed as a tool to provide financial independence and equality for everyone, insurance can play an important role in addressing this disparity. While this has been a focus in emerging markets, financial stability and independence is often assumed in more developed markets, like the U.S. and Europe. In reality, it is a problem facing all markets, and increasingly so. Ace Callwood, CEO of Painless1099, a bank account for freelancers that helps them save money for taxes, agrees that insurance has an important role to play. “It’s our job to get people to a place where they can afford to buy the products we are trying to sell,” he said.

Silicon Valley exemplifies the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Very little has changed over the past decade, with the Valley still mired in myth and stale stereotype. Ask any older entrepreneurs or women who have tried to get financing; they will tell you of the walls they keep hitting. Speak to VCs, and you will realize they still consider themselves kings and kingmakers.

With China’s innovation centers nipping at the Valley’s heels, and with the innovation centers that Steve Case calls “the rest” on the rise, it is time to dispel some of Silicon Valley’s myths.

Myth 1: Only the young can innovate

The words of one Silicon Valley VC will stay with me always. He said: “People under 35 are the people who make change happen, and those over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.” VCs are still looking for the next Mark Zuckerberg.

The bias persists despite clear evidence that the stereotype is wrong. My research in 2008 documented that the average and median age of successful technology company founders in the U.S. is 40. And several subsequent studies have made the same findings. Twice as many of these founders are older than 50 as are younger than 25; twice as many are over 60 as are under 20. The older, experienced entrepreneurs have the greatest chances of success.

Don’t forget that Marc Benioff was 35 when he founded Salesforce.com; Reid Hoffman 36 when he founded LinkedIn. Steve Jobs’s most significant innovations at Apple — the iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and iPad — came after he was 45. Qualcomm was founded by Irwin Jacobs when he was 52 and by Andrew Viterbi when he was 50. The greatest entrepreneur today, transforming industries including transportation, energy and space, is Elon Musk; he is 47.

There is a perennial debate about who can be an entrepreneur. Jason Calacanis proudly proclaimed that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and start off running lemonade stands as kids. Fred Wilson blogged about being shocked when a professor told him you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now,” he wrote, “and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Yet my teams at Duke and Harvard had documented that the majority, 52%, of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business. Only a quarter of the sample we surveyed had caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half hadn’t even thought about entrepreneurship even then.

Anyone can be an entrepreneur, especially in this era of exponentially advancing technologies, in which a knowledge of diverse technologies is the greatest asset.

Myth 3: Higher education provides no advantage

Thiel made headlines in 2011 with his announcement that he would pay teenagers $100,000 to quit college and start businesses. He made big claims about how these dropouts would solve the problems of the world. Yet his foundation failed in that mission and quietly refocused its efforts and objectives to providing education and networking. As Wired reported, “Most (Thiel fellows) are now older than 20, and some have even graduated college. Instead of supplying bright young minds with the space and tools to think for themselves, as Thiel had originally envisioned, the fellowship ended up providing something potentially more valuable. It has given its recipients the one thing they most lacked at their tender ages: a network.”

This came as no surprise. Education and connections are essential to success. As our research at Duke and Harvard had shown, companies founded by college graduates have twice the sales and twice the employment of companies founded by others. What matters is that the entrepreneur complete a baseline of education; the field of education and ranking of the college don’t play a significant role in entrepreneurial success. Founder education reduces business-failure rates and increases profits, sales and employment.

Myth 4: Women can’t succeed in tech

Women-founded firms receive hardly any venture-capital investments, and women still face blatant discrimination in the technology field. Tech companies have promised to narrow the gap, but there has been insignificant progress.

This is despite the fact that, according to 2017 Census Bureau data, women earn more than two-thirds of all master’s degrees, three-quarters of professional degrees and 80% of doctoral degrees. Not only do girls surpass boys on reading and writing in almost every U.S. school district, they often outdo boys in math — particularly in racially diverse districts.

Earlier research by my team revealed there are also no real differences in success factors between men and women company founders: both sexes have exactly the same motivations, are of the same age when founding their startups, have similar levels of experience and equally enjoy the startup culture.

Other research has shown that women actually have the advantage: that women-led companies are more capital-efficient, and venture-backed companies run by a woman have 12% higher revenues, than others. First Round Capital found that companies in its portfolio with a woman founder performed 63% better than did companies with entirely male founding teams.

Many would-be entrepreneurs believe they can’t start a company without VC funding. That reflected reality a few years ago, when capital costs for technology were in the millions of dollars. But it is no longer the case.

A $500 laptop has more computing power today than a Cray 2 supercomputer, costing $17.5 million, did in 1985. For storage, back then, you needed server farms and racks of hard disks, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and required air-conditioned data centers. Today, one can use cloud computing and cloud storage, costing practically nothing.

With the advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and 3D printing, the technologies are becoming cheaper, no longer requiring major capital outlays for their development. And if entrepreneurs develop new technologies that customers need or love, money will come to them, because venture capital always follows innovation.

Venture capital has become less relevant than ever to startup founders.

If your agency is still picking up the phone and hoping for the best, things probably aren’t going to turn out the way you imagined.

The real future of insurance lies in leveraging the power of smart technology to streamline the sales process, increase conversions and have more productive agents and brokers.

Sounds like a dream for your business, right?

Every agent and broker wants to be able to sell more efficiently, hitting the right customers with the best products for their needs, and not waste time. Operating this way lets sales professionals shine and provides excellent customer service — something consumers expect today.

So how do you get there?

One way is through the right CRM system. These systems work in three main areas, which we’re going to cover in this post:

Offering sales insights

Boosting productivity

Providing flexibility during the sales processes

Smarter Sales Via AI-Powered Sales Insights

Consumers today expect a lot more from brokers and agents than ever before. It’s not enough to provide some information and call it a day.

Nope, consumers can get that part done on their own. Thanks to the internet, most consumers have already spent some time researching online and finding the basics. Now, what they are interested in is getting deeper insight and information from sales professionals.

Consumers want to know how a particular product is going to affect their business, where they will be able to see value in their investment and if customer service will continue after purchase.

The salespeople who are getting the best results are those who have seen this shift and have adjusted their approach to leads with this in mind. In fact, after analyzing almost 1 million sales calls, Gong Labs found the best performing “superstar” sales representatives talk about business and value 52% more than their peers.

That focus from merely highlighting features to deeply providing value on how a product or service can help their business can make all the difference when it comes to closing deals.

One area that is helping to drive this shift toward discussing the business and value is through sales insights. Tools today can use AI, predictive analytics and automated insights to offer agents and brokers data from lead scoring to opportunities for cross-selling and upselling customers.

Plus, integrated platforms allow for workflows to be managed across one system, removing back office backlogs and data silos that can get in the way of closing deals. Now, an agent can look at leads and use a data-driven approach to determine which are most likely to close, maximizing their potential.

Faster Sales Via Productivity-Boosting Features

When it comes to sales, downtime is not a good thing. After all, being as productive as possible accelerates the process of closing deals.

As you can see from the chart, the majority of the time gets dedicated to administrative tasks, service tasks, meetings and traveling.

This is not a sustainable formula for the future of insurance agents and brokers (or sales in general).

The best agents and brokers are also the most productive. They keep track of their leads and customers and are quick to spot any potential issues, such as deals that are slowing down. They also know when to suggest action.

No, this isn’t a unique gift; instead, top brokers and agents know how to analyze the data by utilizing the right tools. Here’s where actionable intelligence can help streamline processes and boost productivity, providing sales professionals with the information they need to prioritize the most promising opportunities.

CRMs that utilize actionable intelligence and workflow automation can update and append activity records and call notes, automatically update the sales pipeline and even configure real-time prices and quotes for customers.

It’s rare to find two different insurance businesses that sell in the same way. Companies have their own processes, methods and even brand culture that differentiates one from another, especially when it comes to sales.

With that being said, flexibility in the sales process is essential. A management system that is too rigid can hinder the opportunities for some brokers and agents while having zero focus on the workflow and see a dramatic increase in employee turnover. Both need to be avoided at all costs.

Here’s where introducing a new management system that offers data-driven insights can help provide the flexibility needed without the potential for critical data to slip through the cracks. Automated systems pull data from every corner of the platform consistently and in real time, giving brokers and agents access to lead scores, upsell and cross-sell potential, red flag issues and retention rates.

All of this information can be used in many ways.

The data can be used to populate customizable forms and reports, which can provide leads with policy details, for example. Plus, information is accessible by agents and brokers as well as the back office and management, removing bottlenecks in the system and allowing the necessary parties to get involved at a moment’s notice to move a lead through the pipeline or save a sale.